Iron Mountain ski jump

Friday, December 4, 2015

IT ALL STARTED... SOME PLACE

As
I walked this morning, about 32, nippy, frosty, it reminded me of so many
mornings like it when I walked to class at IU, Indiana University, and I was
very thankful to be back here, in Bloomington, to close the circle, to be
“where my life began.”

I really think of it that way. Mostly because it was at
IU that I met Helen, and none of the rest of my life would have been possible
without her, but the whole IU experience opened the world to me. Those were a
marvelous four years. Yes, there was the usual heartbreak of romantic
rejections, before I met Helen, and the uncertainty about what I was supposed
to do with my life, all the usual stuff of that stage of life, but it was like
being put into the basket of a trebuchet and then flung out into
space--uncertain where you’ll land, but exhilarating.

At the same time, I feel a little embarrassed at saying
my life started at IU, because Oakland City, IN was so good to me. Moving there
in the middle of the first semester of 5th grade, a poor country
kid, without decent clothes, who had to ride on a horse-drawn wagon with his
father to go into town, those OC kids were so accepting of me anyway. They had
a high regard for education and intelligence. As soon as I started getting the
best grades in class, [matched by James Burch], they were even nicer to me.
They thought that was great, quite unlike the anti-intellectual tenor of our
current times.

The good grades were a surprise to me. We did not have
letter grades at Lucretia Mott Public School # 3 in Indianapolis. Each grading
period the teacher wrote something like “Johnny isn’t too awful.” I already
knew that.

Oakland City was old-fashioned. We had quizzes in
spelling and arithmetic and all the other subjects almost every day. No concern
for privacy--we passed them to the kid across the aisle to grade. Quickly
everybody knew that I got all the answers right.

On top of that, Uncle Ted, my mother’s oldest brother,
who once served in the Indiana Legislature, lived only 5 miles away now, and
had no children, so he became a sort of grandfather. He promised me a dime for
each A and a nickel for each B. I was rich.

I wasn’t really competitive. I didn’t try to out-shine
the other kids. I was glad if they got good grades, too. But I wanted their
respect, and I wanted dimes.

Strangely, I think a lot of my dimes were the result of
Lucretia Mott School, so I guess maybe I should say that my life started in
Indianapolis. The state board of education, or whoever made those decisions in
those days, decided that PS 3 would be an ideal place to try out new ways of
educating. It was a poor but respectable section of the city. Educators were
not afraid to come into our part of town, which was probably the main reason we
were chosen. All the kids were white. Our parents were uneducated and
compliant, so they would not complain if the experiments went wrong.

A lot of the experiments did not work. I was afraid for
years to sing. I still can’t draw. I could not learn to read by having whole
phrases flashed onto a screen by a slide projector. [Part of experimentation
was using new technology.]

But the Hawthorne effect worked.

The
AT&T labor engineers experimented at the Hawthorne, IL plant. They gave the
employees longer lunch breaks, and productivity went up. They brought in snack
machines, and productivity went up. They gave folks nice stools instead of
making them stand up to work the assembly lines, and productivity went up.

The
message was pretty clear. But then one of the engineers got a bright idea.

He
shortened lunch breaks, and productivity went up. He took away snack machines,
and productivity went up. He took away the nice stools and made people stand up
to work at the assembly lines, and productivity went up.

Productivity was the result of getting attention! The
attention mattered. The employees felt that they were respected, that not just
what they did mattered but that they themselves mattered.

So,
I think I got dimes at Oakland City in part because I got a lot of attention at
School # 3 in Indianapolis. Also because of Saturday afternoon matinees at the Tacoma
Theater, where I learned not to trust guys in black hats.

Well,
my life started some place, and I give thanks for all the folks who helped me
along the way.